3/10/2024 0 Comments Sesame street little dollhouse![]() Tall people hit their heads more often, you see. They then reinforce the lesson through an odd, out-of-nowhere bit with Laugh-In‘s Arte Johnson as his famous-at-the-time German soldier character, talking about the difference between tall and short. Instead of obviously instructing about scale and relativity, the message of “tall,” “taller,” “even taller” is clear. Gordon, however, tells him that he can grant this particular wish, and he stands up behind him, puts his arms underneath his and lifts him up, first so that he’s higher than Bert and then higher than even himself, prompting the ticklish Ernie to initially giggle before finally looking around and saying in awe, “I’m taller than everybody!” That is until Big Bird pokes his head out of his home and says, “Not quite everybody! Hi, itty bitty Ernie!” before placing a gentle kiss on his head–a lovely example of Sesame Street teaching by showing rather than telling or condescending. ![]() The Muppets were finally paying the bills on their own (by the mid-’70s, Sesame Street merch was bringing in nearly $10 mil) and doing so via a fully positive, altruistic source, which is pretty incredible.Īnd now, returning to this episode, after Gordon welcomes us back to the street, he happens upon Bert and Ernie, who are having a bit of a squabble over who is taller, which essentially amounts to Ernie realizing he’s actually shorter but sometimes wishing he weren’t. ![]() By Season 3, the frog was thankfully restored to his proper position.īig Bird sticks his beak into the conversation.Īs a sidenote, Sesame Street became such a huge success for Henson Associates that they started to scale back on doing commercials and eventually cut that out of their business almost all together, other than a few scattered campaigns that Jim particularly believed in, because that income stream was no longer needed. But Jim became sensitive about the accusation and so wanted to distance the frog from the PBS show, and in Season 2, Kermit was gone, his former “lecture” spots taken over by a new character called Herbert Birdsfoot (performed by Jerry Nelson), who failed to catch on with the kids. Now, this was uninformed for numerous reasons: Kermit appeared on Sesame Street but was, of course, around long before it, often in commercials selling things Hey Cinderella!, again, was also filmed long before and had no connection to Sesame Street and no mention of Sesame Street was retroactively added to this broadcast. Although Hey Cinderella! was filmed in 1968, it didn’t air on American TV until 1970, and when it did, one vocally prominent critic accused Jim Henson of selling out and crassly commercializing Sesame Street by featuring one of “their” characters on network TV. What isn’t immediately apparent, however, is that one famous Muppet is actually missing, and that’s Kermit. The design has returned to something closer to how he originally looked, albeit green and with sharper features. Meanwhile, it seems like Henson’s Muppet building team, headed by Don Sahlin, were still tinkering with Oscar because although he was finally green on Flip Wilson, his face looked strange, and here, about a month later, he is more recognizable as our favorite Grouch. And, as we first saw on Flip Wilson yesterday, while the former’s voice is still a little dopier than we’re used to, his eyes now look expressive, rather than dull, and he has more feathers on top, both of which make him seem brighter and more aware. ![]() At the end of that first shot, we see Bert and Ernie in another relatively rare exterior appearance, which seems to be designed to stress how important the Muppets are to the series, and soon afterwards, Big Bird, and later, Oscar show up. The show’s already come a long way from its initial hesitancy to feature imagination on the street itself. Compared to the small handful of people who greeted viewers in the first aired episode, the first pan shot of this episode is stuffed with characters: adults, children, and perhaps most importantly, Muppets. One of the most instantly striking features about this episode is just how big and full the street now seems. Gordon interrupts Ernie and Bert’s argument.Īs I alluded to in previous posts, when the already monumentally successful Sesame Street returned for its second season premiere on Novem(available for purchase as part of the Sesame Street: Old School Volume 1 DVD set), it featured some changes that came about as a result of discovering what worked and what didn’t during their first experimental year.
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